


If you love it so much, why don't you take care of it?

by Go_Fic_Yourself



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos needs a hair cut, Cecil is opposed, Domesticity, Fluff, M/M, Minor passive aggressiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-18 23:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2365523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go_Fic_Yourself/pseuds/Go_Fic_Yourself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos thinks he needs a haircut. Cecil disagrees. Carlos makes a proposal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If you love it so much, why don't you take care of it?

Carlos frowned at the soft "plink!" noise of another tooth from his comb breaking off and flying off somewhere in the bathroom, undoubtably to be stepped on in the middle of the night. He sighed and spritzed some detangling serum on the knot before trying to comb through it again.  
"Plink!"  
He was convinced that the detangling serum was actually just water, but hadn't convinced the other members of his team to give him time with the mass spectrometer to confirm his theory.  
"Plink!"  
His comb was almost as much gap as it was teeth now and this was only the third time he'd used this one. He had briefly tried a metal comb, but somehow seeing the teeth all bent and warped was more disturbing than the plastic one's hillbilly grin.  
"Plink!"  
He growled, throwing the comb into the trash can and setting to work undoing the knot with his fingers.  
Cecil's head poked through the open door. "Are you coming to bed soon?"  
Carlos did his level best not to shoot his boyfriend an irritated look. "Ceec, I've been untangling my hair since I got out of the shower twenty minutes ago. It's time for a haircut."  
"A trim?"  
"No, Cecil. An actual cut. A couple inches at least."  
Cecil meeped. "But Carlos! Your hair!"  
"Yes Cecil, MY hair. It's hot, unruly, unprofessional and pretty soon it's going to be a safety hazard in the lab. And most importantly, it's driving me crazy!"  
"Taking care of long hair isn't that hard!" He said, indicating his own.  
Carlos arched an eyebrow at the glossy pin straight hair that fell in an inky curtain to Cecil's shoulder blades comparing it to his own rowdy curls that had only recently met the tops of his shoulders. Though he supposed they could both technically be described as being "black hair" they were very different creatures. His, temperamental and reactive, Cecil's placid and serene.  
"It can't be as bad as you're making it sound!" Cecil huffed in response to Carlos' insolent eyebrow.  
"You know what? Let's do an experiment."  
Cecil's eyes lit up, a Pavlovian response to being included in Carlos' work.  
"You like my hair, I don't. If you want me to keep it long, you can help take care of it. How does that sound?"  
Mandated time to play with Carlos' perfect hair? It sounded like groundhog's day had come early this year! (it had, actually, but only by a couple days.) "That sounds neat!" He gasped, barely able to contain himself.  
"But!" He continued, "You have three strikes. You hurt me three times in any hair brushing or miss three, I get to have it cut."  
Cecil considered this for a moment. "Ok."  
"That also means you have to get up with me in the morning to get the knots out before I go to work."  
Cecil didn't really love the sound of that, he was not, by nature, a morning person. But he figured that getting up early was a small sacrifice for the continued existence of Carlos' lush and perfect hair. Besides, he was sure this would become a delightfully cosy ritual with which to start and end their day.  
It did not become a delightful or cosy ritual. The first night Cecil pulled Carlos' hair often, twice painfully enough to give him two of his three strikes for the session. Carlos' hair was like a thick curtain of tangled threads that he had the Herculean task of taming. "To be fair, it is a little harder than normal because I haven't had the ends trimmed in a while." Carlos assured him.  
Bullshit.  
Carlos had it trimmed the following afternoon and it wasn't even a little easier.  
On the second morning Cecil woke up at 11 to find a message on his phone. It was a picture of Carlos, probably taken by one of his team, leaning on a baseball bat in the lab, his hair in a messy ponytail and shooting a sloppy salute at the camera.  
"Strike one, lover boy." The message read.  
"Why didn't you wake me up?" He shot back.  
"I tried, Ceec. You hissed and bit my hand."  
"Oh."  
"Yeah."  
"Where did you get a baseball bat?"  
"Lab armory. It's actually the cleaning supply closet, but it has more weapons than cleaning supplies, so we're just calling it what it is."  
"Oh. Sorry about biting you. I love you, Carlos. Have a good day."  
"It's ok. Love you too, querido. See you tonight."

At the end of a month Cecil had comes close to three strikes for hurting Carlos almost every night, but he hadn't missed another day. Until now. He stumbled in at three AM after covering the events of the third annual Night Vale Craft and Venomous Insect Fair for thirteen consecutive hours. To be fair it had been a roller coaster from start to finish, ending only because the winner of the raffle had set their prize (a small swarm of radioactive killer bees) loose in the gymnasium where the event was being held.  
Carlos was already fast asleep and nested in Cecil's pillow was a baseball that Carlos had sharpied "strike two" with a little red heart next to it.  
"You're a jerk." He muttered to his sleeping boyfriend, before setting the ball on the night stand and collapsing on the bed, mostly asleep before he hits the pillow. 

The next morning Cecil clawed his way out of bed after Carlos' alarm went off and mainlined coffee while Carlos got ready. Everything on but his lab coat he settled down in front of Cecil with a scientific journal. Cecil set to work, sleepily removing the stubborn snarls and and knots that infested his boyfriend's hair as he slept. He yawned between sections and felt sleep tugging at the corners of his mind, but Carlos hummed in appreciation when the brush went smoothly through an untangled section, turning to press a kiss against the delicate skin of Cecil's wrist.  
It was not delightful or cosy, but it was intimate and like them, it was perfectly imperfect. And he could do this forever...if Carlos got just a couple inches taken off.


End file.
